Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Kushners Made Deal With Japan-Owned Firm, Raising Conflict Of Interest Concerns

The Kushner Companies made a real estate deal last year with a company whose largest shareholder is the government of Japan, raising more concerns that White House senior advisor Jared Kushner may have a conflict of interest between his foreign policy work and his family business.

An ownership stake in 175 Pearl Street was sold for $103 million in March 2017 to a company operating for a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., which according to Japanese law must have at least one-third of its shares — effectively a controlling stake — owned by the Japanese government.

NTT, which paid a 60% premium per square foot over what the Kushner Companies paid four years earlier, denied that it was seeking any political gain in its business dealings. The building is still vacant more than a year later.

Yoshinori Ogawa, a senior strategist at Okasan Securities in Tokyo, told Bloomberg, which first reported the deal on Tuesday that it was unlikely that the Japanese government influenced NTT’s investments.

But Kushner’s decision last year not to sell all his holdings in the family real estate business opened him up to concerns about conflicts of interest — especially since he was tasked by the White House at the time of the sale with overseeing trade policy, which could have affected imports, exports and tariffs related to Japan.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that multiple foreign governments, including Israel, China and the United Arab Emirates, have held internal discussions since Trump’s election about how to take advantage of Kushner’s global business dealings and political inexperience in order to shape U.S. policy towards their countries, The Washington Post reported last month.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.